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MR | Second Edition, June 2014 – Back to it

Last week on Drunken Speculation, we were on a blogging holiday, so we didn’t write anything.

Both of us took the opportunity to take a break from beer, thinking about beer and recharge the batteries. I enjoyed the break – it’s just nice to change it up from time to time and the break was welcome mentally and physically.

A major change we’re making is ditching our timetable. Last year, we posted four times a week and the first half of this year, three times. After 269 posts, which includes a lot of forgettable rubbish, we’ve taken that as far as we want and interest seems to have largely levelled off. Going forward, Monday Reading will begin each week but whether anything else gets written will depend on whether we have anything worth sharing. So there’ll be a lot fewer posts about events and venues (I expect a lot of that will get shunted to our Facebook page) and maybe longer, less frequent posts about the who, what, how and other interrogatives of beer. I’m hoping I’ll be able to attack things as they pique my interest instead of pinning it for later because I have a less-than-memorable beer review to write.

Before we get stuck into other people’s words, the Beer of the Week was 8 Wired Fresh Hop Wired IPA. In my new Archive growler, this was a super hoppy beer with great fresh pine and pineapple notes.

What do all these beers have in common? They’ve been around for a while and aren’t the new kid on the block any more.

Even though all these beers are highly regarded – Torpedo is the best-selling IPA in America – they’ve also been around for years. Arrogant Bastard Ale has been made since 1997. Dogfish Head’s 60 Minute IPA was among the first of the style to really break through. North Coast Old Rasputin, despite being rated as one of the best imperial stouts on the market, is available everywhere North Coast distributes, which is nearly the entire US.

Craft breweries who regularly deal in 50 IBUs have developed a different focus: how to make intense flavors harmonize. As weird as it sounds, I think that if MillerCoors wants to make really tasty specialty beers (double IPAs and spiced ales and barrel-aged stouts), they should probably send their brewers off to apprentice at craft breweries. It’s one thing to make very consistent light lagers; it’s quite another to manage a barrel room.

Less light exposure. Less carbon dioxide loss during filling. Durability approaching unbreakable. Add-on options, such as the GrowlerSuit (and similar cycling-jersey-for-your-growler-like options), can better protect existing growlers from light and temperature fluctuations. Newer concepts like Synek Draft System, which will employ pressure-rated disposable pouches initially empty of air, could help fix oxygen issues. As one further option, breweries like Oskar Blues Brewery and (more recently) Cigar City Brewing have begun using the Crowler, a 32-ounce can that’s purged, filled immediately, and sealed atop the bar.

Then the wife – who curiously is never named in the ads – gives Mick an exasperated look which says ‘‘I told you I wouldn’t put up with shit like this from you again’’. And then the guys somehow end up at the bar again.

While they booze on, we see the Carlton Mid tagline ‘‘Stay a little longer’’, which is obviously directed at the guys. If it was directed at the wife it’d read ‘‘Leave, your husband is a dickhead”.

The barman clutches a glass. He hesitates and I watch his mind wrestling with itself. I know what’s afoot instantly. The glass is warm from the glasswasher. I know what he is thinking. He internalises the problem instantly and I see him putting the arguments to himself. “This glass is hot. Should I find another or just serve in it anyway ?” will be the gist. The decision is made more or less at once. Inside his head he silently says “Fuck it”. The half is served in a warm glass, which I detect immediately by the simple expedient of putting my paw round it. “You made the wrong decision there” I say. The barman looks at me slightly uncomfortably. “We both know that glass was too warm for the beer don’t we?” I add. He says nothing, but pours the beer away, checks for a cold glass and serves me the beer.

Unfortunately, this particular visit saw some fellow Milers given some below-average beers that seemed not entirely ready to serve, and there was one glass of The Pale which took London Murky to its extreme. The beer was everything that unfined beer critics would just love to be served: an opaque liquid the colour of a manilla envelope that couldn’t have finished fermenting. The beer was exchanged but not taken off sale. Concerns were raised with the brewers and were duly noted, but it was still a low point on which to end the Mile.

The phrase “beer waste” might not inspire confidence, but the byproducts of brewing the beverage are plentiful, cost industry a huge amount each year (Spanish beer brewing company Mahou has partially supported this new research) and are made up of the chemical components found in bone — including phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and silica. It’s organic waste, so is usually used in agriculture or animal feed. But the Spanish collaborators think they have a better solution.

I want to be clear that using a different yeast species for fermentation is not a new idea, all of those Brettanomyces beers that crowd the shelves and taps at your local beer nerd watering hole are using different yeast species. Almost 10 years ago, a female homebrewer made a beer from yeast she cultured out of her own vagina (named the beer original pussy beer or OPB — advancing the theory that all fermentation came from the natural vaginal flora of the original female brewers in Sumeria). I wouldn’t recommend people go that far, yeast can be pathogenic, especially Candida species, but I encourage people to thoughtfully research the pathogenic properties of different species and make test batches.